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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet
Foods & Ingredients
Eat
In Guide’s Five time Outstanding Outlet Award Winner
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21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
The Lanzerac
manor house under a winter sky
In
this week’s
MENU:
Sampling luxury at Lanzerac Pot roast chicken Wine Spectator in praise of South African wine
To take a look at our Main Ingredient blogs, follow the
link: http://adamastorbacchus.blogspot.com/
because to tell our whole story
here would take too much space and you can also read earlier blogs. Click on Bold words in the
text of this edition to open links to pictures, blogs, pertinent
websites or more information. Follow us on Twitter: @mainingmenu
This week’s Product menu: The exchange rate is biting. We have already had
some massive price increases, especially on French poultry products (we were
warned a while ago) and we are seeing rises on some of the more ordinary
products as well. The adage “buy while stocks last” was never more true. We are
also seeing the more slow-moving products being discontinued, and we have
started to remove some of these items, like aged balsamics, from our online
shop. We saw the increases on the shelves in France and the dip in the value of
our own currency amplifies the effect. One of the wine dealers who imports
wines from Europe has discontinued all imported labels for the present.
Buying from us on Line We have a lot of fun putting MENU together each week and, of course, doing the things we
write about, but making it possible for you to enjoy rare and wonderful gourmet
foods is what drives our business. We stock a good
range of ingredients
and delicious ready-made gourmet foods which you are unlikely to find elsewhere
in South Africa. You can contact us by email or
phone, or through our
on line shop. We can
send your requirements to you anywhere in South Africa. Please do not pay until we have confirmed
availability and invoiced you.
When you make an eft payment, make sure that it says who you are. Use the form
on the website to email us your order and we will send you the final invoice once
we’ve made sure stock is available. Click
here to see the shop.
Our market activities Come and visit us at the Old Biscuit Mill’s
wonderfully exciting, atmospheric Neighbourgoods
Market, as always, this
Saturday and every Saturday between 09h00 and 14h00. Tip:
Some visitors tell us how they struggle to find parking. It’s quite easy if you
know how. Click
here for a map which shows
where we park.
Ramadan is upon us.
We wish all our Muslim readers well over the month of fasting. We hope you
will enjoy peace and good health.
Sampling a little luxury at Lanzerac? You can too. Staying at a five star hotel
is something we all love to do but, with the recession, we find sometimes that the
budget just doesn’t stretch that far. So we look for great bargains and, often
in winter, we find superb offers that are too good to miss. Being in the media
also helps us as we are very fortunate to get invited to some of them, often
because of the Klink awards. We will be doing a few others over the next few
weeks.
Last Friday, we and several other members of the media
sampled an event that will start on Women’s Day, Friday August 9th at Lanzerac
Hotel and Spa. Hosted by Jenny Morris, the very popular Giggling Gourmet, they
have organised an absolutely fun and luxury filled event. You will enjoy a
three course gourmet dinner paired with Lanzerac wines, 5 star luxury
accommodation, a hearty hotel breakfast and a cook off between Jenny and
talented chef Stephen Fraser on Saturday morning, which you will be able to
enjoy as a light lunch with the Estate’s newly released Mrs English Chardonnay,
before setting off home with a complimentary goodie bag. And all this for the
amazing price of R1 250 per person. Places are limited, so get your booking in
NOW. For reservations and queries contact 021 887 1132 or res@lanzerac.co.za. To see what we did, what
we ate and drank, where we stayed and how much
we enjoyed it (and we most certainly did), click here. While you are there,
you could also take advantage of their Spa, prices are on their web site and
this must be booked. Please note, this is not part of the offer.
This week’s recipe is for a pot roasted
chicken. Lynne uses a romertopf,
a clay pot with a lid the same size as the base, which you soak in water for
half an hour before putting in the chicken, spices, herbs on a base of
vegetables and roasting for about an hour. The chicken comes out beautifully moist.
You can remove the lid and crisp up the chicken at the end, but the best thing
about this is that all the wonderful chicken juices help to cook and flavour
the vegetables beneath it and produce a rich gravy. You don’t need a romertopf,
you can use a heavy casserole with a tight lid, like Le Creuset, and you can
choose your own mix of vegetables and accompanying flavours. You do not have to
add any oil or fat to the vegetables, as the chicken has enough to moisten the
dish. You can season the chicken with just salt and freshly ground black pepper
or any combination of spices you like. Paprika, celery salt and za’atar are a
great mix, so is ras al hanout, which will give the dish a Moroccan flavour, or
you can use a favourite rub. Despite the fact that you are putting a whole bulb
of garlic into the dish, it will be roasted and mild. You can peel it or leave
it in its skin.
Pot Roast Chicken on a bed of
Winter Vegetables
1 free range organic chicken – 1 bulb of
garlic, split into cloves – 1 lemon cut in half – a bouquet garni (tie together
with string, sprigs of thyme, rosemary and oregano wrapped in two bay leaves.
Leave a long end to make it easier to fish out after cooking) – 1 sprig of
rosemary and 2 of thyme – 1 T of olive oil – seasoning to taste
Roughly chopped and peeled onions, carrots, celery,
fennel, turnips, butternut, parsnips, leeks courgettes, or what you like best
or have in the house.
Place the vegetables in the base of the pot with the
bouquet garni. Season lightly. Put in most of the garlic with the vegetables
but keep about 6 aside to put inside the chicken. Rub the chicken all over with
the oil, then season it well inside and out with your chosen seasonings. Put
one half of the lemon inside the chicken with the garlic, a sprig of rosemary
and thyme. Rest the chicken on the vegetables. Squeeze the other half of the
lemon over the chicken and add two tablespoons of water to the vegetables. Set
the oven to 180°C and roast closed for half an hour. Baste the chicken and add
a little water if there is no liquid in the bottom of the pan. Close the pot
and roast for another half an hour or until the chicken is cooked and starting
to fall apart. Drain off the juices and use as gravy. Portion the chicken and
serve with the vegetables. We like separately roasted potatoes with this but
you can add your potatoes to the other vegetables.
Wine Spectator’s July Cover story is all about South African wines. We
quote: “South Africa's challenge
is to meet the future without abandoning the best of the past. It's a balancing
act, and a difficult one. The nation is making better wines than ever thanks to
new plantings and the best of old-vine vineyards... This profoundly beautiful
wine region is finding a new path to quality in the post-apartheid era. How a
new generation is reshaping South Africa’s destiny, fuelled by a flood of
energy, technology and investment”. South Africa: An Emerging Giant. Their senior editor, James Molesworth,
spent two weeks visiting wine producers in the Cape. He wrote a series of blogs about his trip, which make interesting
reading. In the article they list 535 wines and give them scores between 95 and
79. We are proponents of the system of scoring out of 20, because scores out of
100 imply a precision which can never be entirely accurate, given the personal
and subjective nature of the process of tasting and scoring wine. So we read
them as scores between 19 and 16. We have published the list in a blog, and
added the ratings the wines received in Platter (they don’t always agree) and
approximate South African prices. See it here.
There is a huge and rapidly growing
variety of interesting things to occupy your leisure time here in the Western
Cape. There
are so many interesting things to do in our world of food and wine that we have
made separate list for each month for which we have information. To see what’s happening in our world of food
and wine (and a few other cultural events), visit
our Events Calendar. It
needs updating and we’ll do that tomorrow. All the events are listed in date
order and we already have a large number of exciting events to entertain you
right through the year.
Learn about wine and cooking
We receive a lot of enquiries from people who want to learn more about wine. Cathy Marston and The Cape Wine Academy both run wine
education courses, some very serious and others more geared to fun. You can see
details of Cathy’s WSET and other courses here and here and the CWA courses here.
Chez
Gourmet in Claremont has a
programme of cooking classes. We plan to visit their French establishment after
Vinexpo. A calendar of their classes can be seen here.
Pete Ayub, who makes our very popular Prego sauce, runs evening cooking classes at Sense of Taste, his
catering company in Maitland. We can recommend them very highly, having enjoyed
his seafood course. Check
his programme here. Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has cooking
classes in Fish Hoek and conducts cooking tours to Normandy. You can see more details here. Emma
Freddi runs the Enrica Rocca cooking courses at her
home in Constantia. Brett Nussey’s Stir Crazy courses are now being
run from Dish Food and Social’s premises in Main Road Observatory (opposite
Groote Schuur hospital). Lynn Angel runs the Kitchen Angel
cooking school and does private dinners at her home. She holds hands-on cooking
classes for small groups on Monday and Wednesday evenings. She trained with
Raymond Blanc, and has been a professional chef for 25 years. More info
here
11th July 2013
Remember - if you can’t find something, we’ll do our
best to get it for you, and, if you’re in Cape Town or elsewhere in the
country, we can send it to you! Check our product list for details and prices.
PS If a word or name is in bold type and underlined,
click on it for more information
Phones:
+27 21 439 3169 / 083 229 1172 / 083 656 4169
Postal
address: 60 Arthurs Rd, Sea Point 8005
Our Adamastor
& Bacchus© tailor-made Wine, Food and Photo tours take small groups (up to 6) to
specialist wine producers who make the best of South Africa’s wines. Have fun
while you learn more about wine and how it is made! Tours can be conducted in
English, German, Norwegian or Dutch flavoured Afrikaans.
Recommendations of products and outside events are not
solicited or charged for, and are made at the
authors’ pleasure. All photographs,
recipes and text used in these newsletters and our
blogs are © John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus.
Our restaurant reviews are usually unsolicited. We prefer to pay for our meals
and not be paid in any way by anyone. Whether we are invited or go
independently, we don’t feel bad if we say we didn’t like it. Honesty is indeed
our best policy. While every effort is made to avoid mistakes, we are human and
they do creep in occasionally, for which we apologise. Our Avast! ®
Anti-Virus software is updated at least daily and our system is scanned
continually for viruses.
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